Download or read book A Year with Mordecai Kaplan written by Steven Carr Reuben and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You are invited to spend a year with the inspirational words, ideas, and counsel of the great twentieth-century thinker Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, through his meditations on the fifty-four weekly Torah portions and eleven Jewish holidays. A pioneer of ideas and action—teaching that “Judaism is a civilization” encompassing Jewish culture, art, and peoplehood; demonstrating how synagogues can be full centers for Jewish living (building one of the first “shuls with a pool”); and creating the first-ever bat mitzvah ceremony (for his daughter Judith)—Kaplan transformed the landscape of American Jewry. Yet much of Kaplan’s rich treasury of ethical and spiritual thought is largely unknown. Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben, who studied closely with Kaplan, offers unique insight into Kaplan’s teachings about ethical relationships and spiritual fulfillment, including how to embrace godliness in everyday experience, our mandate to become agents of justice in the world, and the human ability to evolve personally and collectively. Quoting from the week’s Torah portion, Reuben presents Torah commentary, a related quotation from Kaplan, a reflective commentary integrating Kaplan’s understanding of the Torah text, and an intimate story about his family or community’s struggles and triumphs—guiding twenty-first-century spiritual seekers of all backgrounds on how to live reflectively and purposefully every day.
Download or read book Judaism as a Civilization written by Mordecai Menahem Kaplan and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2023-07-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1934, Mordecai Kaplan's groundbreaking study of Judaism as a civilization remains a landmark work of Jewish thought. Kaplan argues that Judaism is not just a religion, but a comprehensive civilization that encompasses everything from language and literature to art and social organization. He lays out a program for the reconstruction of American-Jewish life that is still relevant today, and his ideas have had a profound influence on Jewish thought and practice in the United States. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Reconstructing Ashkenaz written by David Malkiel and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-10 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconstructing Ashkenaz shows that, contrary to traditional accounts, the Jews of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages were not a society of saints and martyrs. David Malkiel offers provocative revisions of commonly held interpretations of Jewish martyrdom in the First Crusade massacres, the level of obedience to rabbinic authority, and relations with apostates and with Christians. In the process, he also reexamines and radically revises the view that Ashkenazic Jewry was more pious than its Sephardic counterpart.
Download or read book Rupture and Reconstruction written by Haym Soloveitchik and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-10 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essay that forms the core of this book is an attempt to understand the developments that have occurred in Orthodox Jewry in America in the last seventy years, and to analyse their implications. The prime change is what is often described as ‘the swing to the right’, a marked increase in ritual stringency, a rupture in patterns of behaviour that has had major consequences not only for Jewish society but also for the nature of Jewish spirituality. For Haym Soloveitchik, the key feature at the root of this change is that, as a result of migration to the ‘New Worlds’ of England, the US, and Israel and acculturation to its new surroundings, American Jewry—indeed, much of the Jewish world— had to reconstruct religious practice from normative texts: observance could no longer be transmitted mimetically, on the basis of practices observed in home and street. In consequence, behaviour once governed by habit is now governed by rule. This new edition allows the author to deal with criticisms raised since the essay, long established as a classic in the field, was originally published, and enables readers to gain a fuller perspective on a topic central to today’s Jewish world and its development.
Download or read book Hope Will Find You written by Naomi Levy and published by Harmony. This book was released on 2010 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this moving, personal work, Levy tells of the painful circumstances she endured with her young daughter's illness, how they grew together, and ultimately how much Levy learned from her daughter's example.
Download or read book Remix Judaism written by Roberta Rosenthal Kwall and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-02-14 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remix Judaism: Preserving Tradition in a Diverse World offers an eloquent and thoughtful new vision for all Jews seeking a sense of belonging in a changing world, regardless of their current level of observance. Kwall sets out a process of selection, rejection, and modification of rituals that allow for a focus on Jewish tradition rather than on the technicalities of Jewish law. Her goal is not to sell her own religious practices to readers but, rather, to encourage them to find their own personal meaning in Judaism outside the dictates of Commandment by broadening their understanding of how law, culture and tradition fit together. In Remix Judaism, Kwall inspires her audience to be intentional and mindful about the space they allocate for these elements in defining their individual Jewish journeys and identities.
Download or read book Reconstructing Judaism written by Ira Eisenstein and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Reconstructing Jerusalem written by Kenneth A. Ristau and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jerusalem--one of the most contested sites in the world. Reconstructing Jerusalem takes readers back to a pivotal moment in its history when it lay ruined and abandoned and the glory of its ancient kings, David and Solomon, had faded. Why did this city not share the same fate as so many other conquered cities, destroyed and forever abandoned, never to be rebuilt? Why did Jerusalem, disgraced and humiliated, not suffer the fate of Babylon, Nineveh, or Persepolis? Reconstructing Jerusalem explores the interrelationship of the physical and intellectual processes leading to Jerusalem's restoration after its destruction in 587 B.C.E., stressing its symbolic importance and the power of the prophetic perspective in the preservation of the Judean nation and the critical transition from Yahwism to Judaism. Through texts and artifacts, including a unique, comprehensive investigation of the archaeological evidence, a startling story emerges: the visions of a small group of prophets not only inspired the rebuilding of a desolate city but also of a dispersed people. Archaeological, historical, and literary analysis converge to reveal the powerful elements of the story, a story of dispersion and destruction but also of re-creation and revitalization, a story about how compelling visions can change the fate of a people and the course of human history, a story of a community reborn to a barren city.
Download or read book Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism written by Jonathan Klawans and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-08 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though considered one of the most important informants about Judaism in the first century CE, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus's testimony is often overlooked or downplayed. Jonathan Klawans's Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism reexamines Josephus's descriptions of sectarian disagreements concerning determinism and free will, the afterlife, and scriptural authority. In each case, Josephus's testimony is analyzed in light of his works' general concerns as well as relevant biblical, rabbinic, and Dead Sea texts. Many scholars today argue that ancient Jewish sectarian disputes revolved primarily or even exclusively around matters of ritual law, such as calendar, cultic practices, or priestly succession. Josephus, however, indicates that the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes disagreed about matters of theology, such as afterlife and determinism. Similarly, many scholars today argue that ancient Judaism was thrust into a theological crisis in the wake of the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE, yet Josephus's works indicate that Jews were readily able to make sense of the catastrophe in light of biblical precedents and contemporary beliefs. Without denying the importance of Jewish law-and recognizing Josephus's embellishments and exaggerations-Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism calls for a renewed focus on Josephus's testimony, and models an approach to ancient Judaism that gives theological questions a deserved place alongside matters of legal concern. Ancient Jewish theology was indeed significant, diverse, and sufficiently robust to respond to the crisis of its day.
Download or read book Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies written by David Nirenberg and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-22 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through most of Western European history, Jews have been a numerically tiny or entirely absent minority, but across that history Europeans have nonetheless worried a great deal about Judaism. Why should that be so? This short but powerfully argued book suggests that Christian anxieties about their own transcendent ideals made Judaism an important tool for Christianity, as an apocalyptic religionÑcharacterized by prizing soul over flesh, the spiritual over the literal, the heavenly over the physical worldÑcame to terms with the inescapable importance of body, language, and material things in this world. Nirenberg shows how turning the Jew into a personification of worldly over spiritual concerns, surface over inner meaning, allowed cultures inclined toward transcendence to understand even their most materialistic practices as spiritual. Focusing on art, poetry, and politicsÑthree activities especially condemned as worldly in early Christian cultureÑhe reveals how, over the past two thousand years, these activities nevertheless expanded the potential for their own existence within Christian culture because they were used to represent Judaism. Nirenberg draws on an astonishingly diverse collection of poets, painters, preachers, philosophers, and politicians to reconstruct the roles played by representations of Jewish ÒenemiesÓ in the creation of Western art, culture, and politics, from the ancient world to the present day. This erudite and tightly argued survey of the ways in which Christian cultures have created themselves by thinking about Judaism will appeal to the broadest range of scholars of religion, art, literature, political theory, media theory, and the history of Western civilization more generally.
Download or read book From Enemy to Friend written by Rabbi Amy Eilberg and published by Orbis Books. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first female Conservative rabbi in the U.S. reflects on ancient Jewish traditions as a guide to reconciliation and peacebuilding in our lives, our communities, and our world.
Download or read book A Jewish Feminine Mystique written by Hasia Diner and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-10 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Feminine Mystique, Jewish-raised Betty Friedan struck out against a postwar American culture that pressured women to play the role of subservient housewives. However, Friedan never acknowledged that many American women refused to retreat from public life during these years. Now, A Jewish Feminine Mystique? examines how Jewish women sought opportunities and created images that defied the stereotypes and prescriptive ideology of the "feminine mystique." As workers with or without pay, social justice activists, community builders, entertainers, and businesswomen, most Jewish women championed responsibilities outside their homes. Jewishness played a role in shaping their choices, shattering Friedan's assumptions about how middle-class women lived in the postwar years. Focusing on ordinary Jewish women as well as prominent figures such as Judy Holliday, Jennie Grossinger, and Herman Wouk's fictional Marjorie Morningstar, leading scholars explore the wide canvas upon which American Jewish women made their mark after the Second World War.
Download or read book Turn It and Turn It for Everything Is in It written by Jonathan Kligler and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jewish sages taught that when we study the Torah we should continuously turn it and turn it, like a gem with countless facets, looking for new and deeper meanings. In this volume of essays on each weekly Torah portion, Rabbi Jonathan Kligler shares choice insights from his decades of study and teaching. Drawing on both ancient and modern sources, and weaving scholarship and personal stories, Kligler invites the reader to investigate the countless layers of insight and inspiration that vibrant Torah study can provide.
Download or read book A Rabbi s Heart written by Menachem Creditor and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2021-03-14 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In reading Rabbi Menachem Creditor's 11-year compilation of poems, stories and meditations, I am once again reminded that the journey towards truth is anything but linear. With the passage of time, what might have once been considered fallacy is now revisited with a deepened maturity and awareness; the same can be said in reverse. So while it is true that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, when it comes to Creditor's own spiritual sojourning, his act of relating personal recollections and later entwining them in this collection of evocative written word creates a most wondrous textured and woven shared lived (and living) history." - Daphne Lazar-Price, Executive Director, Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance"Everything feeds into Rabbi Creditor's observations about the world and about the soul. He is a Magid, a storyteller, and a Musarnick, a moral counselor and advisor. Menachem Creditor is a Rabbi. These are not essays that demand to be read in sequence but they demand to be read with seriousness. Don't get me wrong - they are not difficult to read or to understand. But each one has many levels, and you can skip from one part to the other and find your appreciation deepening with each reading. The Talmud teaches, in one of its most beautiful and fanciful statements, that behind each blade of grass is an angel that whispers 'grow.' Behind each essay here is the same whisper, urging us to grow. Only it does not come from an angel; it comes from a Rabbi. Read, and grow." - from the Foreword by Rabbi David Wolpe
Download or read book Covenant of Blood written by Lawrence A. Hoffman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Central to both biblical narrative and rabbinic commentary, circumcision has remained a defining rite of Jewish identity, a symbol so powerful that challenges to it have always been considered taboo. Lawrence Hoffman seeks to find out why circumcision holds such an important place in the Jewish psyche. He traces the symbolism of circumcision through Jewish history, examining its evolution as a symbol of the covenant in the post-exilic period of the Bible and its subsequent meaning in the formative era of Mishnah and Talmud. In the rabbinic system, Hoffman argues, circumcision was neither a birth ritual nor the beginning of the human life cycle, but a rite of covenantal initiation into a male "life line." Although the evolution of the rite was shaped by rabbinic debates with early Christianity, the Rabbis shared with the church a view of blood as providing salvation. Hoffman examines the particular significance of circumcision blood, which, in addition to its salvific role, contrasted with menstrual blood to symbolize the gender dichotomy within the rabbinic system. His analysis of the Rabbis' views of circumcision and menstrual blood sheds light on the marginalization of women in rabbinic law. Differentiating official mores about gender from actual practice, Hoffman surveys women's spirituality within rabbinic society and examines the roles mothers played in their sons' circumcisions until the medieval period, when they were finally excluded.
Download or read book A Book of Life written by Michael Strassfeld and published by Jewish Lights Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charts a path to a spiritually rich Judaism, explaining traditional rituals and offering new ones for modern life. Encourages daily spiritual awareness as we seek the two fundamental goals of Judaism: to become better humans and to be in God's presence.
Download or read book Resurrecting Hebrew written by Ilan Stavans and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2008 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the resurrection of the Hebrew language from extinction focuses on the role of Eliezer ben Yehuda in the nineteenth-century revival of Hebrew, as well as the part language plays in Jewish survival, the origins of Israel, Zionism, the Diaspora, and the idea of a promised land. 20,000 first printing.
